Jordi Alexander on Market Outlook, Token Buybacks, and Neo Finance

If you're going to do systematic, I think like the one thing is just don't have something that will just keep buying top lasting because when the market's good, your revenue is good and you're just like pushing prices way too high, which is not good for anyone because when things revert, you just have people that are down way too much and you've also not absorbed enough tokens. What's your take on the token equity uh situation happening right now? How do you see this unification happening in 2026? Do you think that is sustainable or do you see this as again just you know the yield's never enough you're going to have to go get more risk uh and the yield that you promised to your stakeholders is going to fall through.

Welcome back to the rollup. I'm Robbie.

I'm Andy. Rob and I met at the University of Florida in 2017 where we first found out about digital assets. We learned a lot along the way and we're bringing you face to face with the leaders of our industry. Sit back, relax, and enjoy today's episode.

Jordi, what's up?

Oh, it is 3:00 a.m. So, I wish it was 11 p.m. Are uh are 3:00 a.m. nights are they conducive to the health? Is this like a polyphasic sleep schedule that we're on or what what's what's up there?

I'm I'm traveling to Switzerland like this weekend. So, I'm kind of okay to try to adjust pre-adjust for jet lag to the Europe hours.

Yeah. Yeah. Jordan, happy new year, man. How was your uh how was your Q4?

I mean, you know, like I I was happy that things were pretty quiet. I didn't get many telegram messages over the holidays. So, it was the first time that I actually disconnected and it was just very nice and chill. Um, I went to Saudi Arabia, which is not a normal destination for uh holidays, but I think it will be in in the next few years. Like, they're they're building some pretty nice resorts.

And what uh what brought you out there?

I just chat GBT, you know, where is where is warm and nice and what are the best places and it seems it gave me a couple good options uh in Saudi Arabia apparently like you know they're spending a lot of money trying to make like a Dubai B2 like a second Dubai and I think they'll get there in a few years.

Yeah, man. I know you're going out to uh St. Moritz for CFC. Should be a fun week with the uh lizard people there in Davos uh who who control the world with their strings and their and the way that they pull things and and that's clearly Trump is not playing by the rules. So, we'll see what how Davos goes. It'll be an interesting interesting one this year. There's a lot of economic activity changing globally. Um we'll get into that. We'll get into some of your token buybacks 2026 outlook, but let's just recap 2025, man. How was it for Seleni? How was your performance? What did you learn? Um, and like what are some of your biggest takeaways from the market in 2025?

Uh, overall, you know, I'm happy that we we did better than 2024, which um, you know, was not easy. I mean, most most firms and, you know, mo most things did not do better than 24. So, um, it kind of speaks that we've really, you know, gotten a ton of talent in and we were able to navigate even even like these choppy situations.

Um, you know, obviously like some categories did better than others. I would say like venture wasn't like having the best year in history. Um, you know, we made like a pretty big bet on WorldCoin that didn't go amazingly well with all alts. you know, basically they didn't under overperform just like, you know, also do well. Um, our systematic trading side, it was a mixed bag, I would say. Like we lost a little bit of competitiveness to like the jump kind of, you know, HFD side, which we're trying to really like aggressively prioritize now.

So, um, you know, number one priority is like just get get like latency and and and networking and execution really tight. Um but we did really well with some of these um you know venues like lighter you know I think we were maybe like the the largest volume on on that exchange and did pretty well in the airdrop. So it was a nice kind of end to the year there and you know we survived 1010 which a lot of people were like oh Wintermute's out of business and then I'm like oh they're like oh there's the rumor mill was hot the mill was hot for sure.

Yeah, I mean we, you know, we we did lose like, you know, a few weeks of P&L. Um, but, you know, these things, these things are as long as you survive and you don't give back too much, it's fine. Yeah. Um, and, uh, you know, some things did really well for us. Um, we're doing more and more um, stuff on the liquid side, you know, long short obviously like the shorts have have, you know, really gone down.

So, you know, when we track things like unlocks and kind of, you know, things that look overvalued, like obviously all of that stuff just kind of went to zero. So, um yeah, overall overall was good.

Good. Yeah, I think uh 1010 scared the boots off a lot of the per farmers. Um it's kind of like made that trade more difficult than it was before that. Um and if you look at the numbers, it's kind of gone down. We'll talk about per.

All right, let's talk about token buybacks. Um, this was like a big thread, a big kind of part of what you were uh kind of pining on recently. I want to talk about that. I want talk about health maxing, just like kind of like general 2026 plan. So, you put out this post in in the midst of kind of this token equity dilemma. Maybe we start here and go into the buybacks as a result of this. So, uh the natural order of thinking in 2026 is going to be like unifying these structures.

So, it's actually quite funny. Robbie and I have kind of came up with this pro- centralization idea as of recent. Maybe it's not their exact way to put it, but you think about how we had all this kind of fugazi decentralization for for the sake of regulatory arbitrage and then obviously with this new administration and regime change in the states specifically, uh, a lot of that kind of is unnecessary now you could say. And so coming to this one of the realities is well there's a lot of realities that are hitting the market as a result of this but I think one of them is that the way that these foundation and labs corps have been structured uh you know have been kind of mis aligned for incentives for investors uh for uh stakeholders for participants retail etc.

So we've got this kind of token equity dilemma and on top of that you've got these app layer projects being purchased uh by larger companies and then selling out kind of leaving token holders with you know not claim on that sale etc. And so you've got this dynamic here that is is happening and then on top of that you've got this token buyback structure.

So Jordy what's your take on the token equity uh situation happening right now? How do you see this unification happening in 2026? Um, we've gathered opinions from tons of different folks and there's all these different kind of ideas. There's yet to be a really consensus way I would say. What's your take here?

Yeah, look like the the main problem for the industry is that every chart is just down only and at some point, you know, what's happened is like retailer has stopped bidding because, you know, they're just not getting enough wins. And um there's a few structural reasons for that that have kind of caused like every single chart to always just go down. Um not least of which, you know, is not related to buybacks. It's more related to like unlocks. And the other thing I've been posting about is, you know, you kind of force investors with these like one-year cliffs.

And I think, you know, the centralized exchanges love that because, you know, they they get to launch things where the only tokens or the marketing tokens that the exchanges are getting. So, they they're the only ones that have tokens. So, they're they're very happy. You know, the exchanges do the do best. Um, and then you get these like artificially high prices. I was looking at back at some of these Binance launchpads from like a year or two ago and it's just every single like project regardless of quality was launching they're at like you know two to three billion. I mean I don't want to like name specific names but you can just go back and look at them and clearly like these are trading at like 99% down now.

Um so a lot of it was like this like structural reason like there's not enough tokens. The founders are drinking way too much Kool-Aid. I be talking about this like it's 5% of founders that I've talked to that like will say that their token is like overvalued. Like to give him credit like someone like you know Mike from Etherfy like you know they launched at like 8 billion and he like I you know we're an investor I talked to him like that week and he's like yeah like this is like dumb like what what the [ __ ] like what are people doing? Like come on. Like you know I love my project but like we're not it's not a billion right now. Um most of them they just drink the Kool-Aid. It's like oh yeah 20 billion. Yeah.

Um and then you know this this concept of like having revenue is good. Um you know it's a maturity of the space and you have revenue to do buybacks. Not many projects have revenue do buybacks but you do have some projects that you know have managed to get there and then and there's a few problems. one is the what you mentioned of like are token holders getting it versus like is it this equity structure and I think um you have to be very clear on it and and like unfortunately like even in the last 48 hours I've had two conversations with projects where I thought that like it was going to be like an equity thing and then you know they're planning to just prioritize equity holders um and it's like yeah you know all these people that bought the token like what's what's going to Yeah.

Um, so that's this ongoing thing where I I always prefer if there's just like a you know the token should be the equity and then you know you get some regulatory concerns or tax concerns or stuff like this come comes back to you. Um I think you know like the US is obviously like right now in a bit more of a tolerant place where you can do you know better things. Um I think an interesting one so soon there's going to be a launch of um something called Fu Fuse Energy which is a company that has raised at 5 billion on the equity side and has separately raised like on the token side at like 333 million. I think Multicoin led that round is a Salana token and that's quite an interesting one because it's going to launch as an SPL while you know there's like this whole other part of the business that's just making like web two money and it's just like a cash cow. I mean they have like 440 million AR like huge but then they're launching a token that's not going to be getting that revenue but then they're going to try to give it utility.

So like you can try to like thread that needle and you have different investors on both sides it's even more it's worse than having like a safe and a saf investor like different investors different investors. Yeah. I think like you know if you do really well everywhere everyone's happy that's fine like know that's a good case scenario. You just like token doing well everybody's everything's doing well. Um but you know the these things are expert kind of like difficulty nightmare difficulty you know things to navigate. Um and then my last point like uh on on the buyback specifically like the projects that we've seen in crypto the few really like successful ones that have uh buybacks like you know you know Jupiter um Hyperliquid right now.

Yeah. Athena like I guess they don't have buybacks directly but the dad has done a ton of buybacks like through the money that they they they raised through token sales there pump yeah for sure I mean I don't know why it's not pumping more but well this is kind of your point isn't it right is like is there a more systematic way to approach buybacks than just programmatically buying daily right right I mean um I think that targeting you know price ranges through some you know ratio either PE ratios or some other kind of like you know ways to find that like what is cheap you know the simplest way to do it is just like look at the EMA like if you're under the average price of the last like 60 days versus over the last price of the last 60 days and you know like things are trending down you want to buy more things are going up you don't you don't necessarily need to chase it and just kind of keep pushing it um you can get more tokens out of the market this way.

Um, so I think like, you know, for the few successful projects that can do it, there's ways to do it. I took a bit offense when like, you know, people say that like they don't work. Like, oh, look down. It doesn't work. I mean, they [ __ ] work, right? They work. Clearly, we know this from like hundreds of years of like, you know, stocks existing like they work. It's just like, you know, other parameters that Well, I mean, in the Jupiter case that that the post that you were referring to, I saw some comments on there and it was like there was about a billion dollars of unlocks over the same period that that did like a $70 million of buybacks, right? And it's just you're just kind of like, well, you know, so the math is not mathing here, right? And so from your perspective, right, there's like a more, you know, you're talking about doing this in a very calculated price to earnings ratio-based way where you can try to achieve a consistent buyback methodology that is not just purely programmatic based on the revenue of that day or of that week.

Um, maybe you can like walk us through that from your perspective, right? because you have kind of more of a fund manager style perspective and less of like a I'm a founder managing my token, you know, perspective, I think, which I think that probably founders want to start to think more in the way that you are rather than in just kind of like doing what the market is screaming them screaming at them to do.

Well, I'm I'm happy with like, you know, both approaches whether it's systematic or not systematic. I mean, you look at like traditional equities, they just like buy back whenever like the, you know, the board decides that that's it's a cheap price and they just buy back their shares and it's like a very standard thing. Obviously, you know, when you're dealing with traditional equities, you know, if they're public companies, you have disclosures, you have windows, blackout windows, these kind of, you know, like there's all these kind of structural considerations so that things don't get too insidery and too front. um you know if we've decided that these are things are commodities then it it's it's sort of like you know what what makes sense but uh I mean we're looking at some projects like I would say like lighter and meteora that do have substantial revenues that are taking this approach of um you know they're not just like doing systematic buybacks but they're like yeah like there's prices we're going to buy back our our cheap tokens and um that should give some confidence to the market that you know the revenue is is going to be utilized um for token holders in some way.

I I think that's the key thing. It's just like at some point you know you have to either give dividends or give buybacks. I think dividends are totally fine obviously like they're very normal things to do and we do have some projects where you stake and you get you know revenue. I think uh you know the curve kind of crew does things like that. Um you know even like their new token yield basis kind of has this kind of structure. You know you stake it if you lock it up for longer you get you just get more dividends. Um I think uh you know sometimes those things go into ponomics. Obviously, you have the full ponzomics which is Olympus down and you have like the semi stuff like aerod drrome where it's like oh you're getting you're locking up and you're getting some other tokens and they're paying your token like it's like this this kind of hybrid structure.

Um, yeah. I mean, if you're going to do systematic, I think like the one thing is just don't have something that will just keep buying top lasting because when the market's good, your revenue is good and you're just like pushing prices way too high, which is not good for anyone because when things revert, you just have people that are down way too much and you've also not absorbed enough tokens. Um, so you know, did did it look like Jupiter was worth $20 billion at the height of like, you know, the volumes that were happening during the Trump token release? You know, maybe. But like um I I would say like what we've seen in crypto time and time again is that the you shouldn't put like a a growth stock P ratio of like 30 plus on on these things because the the space changes so quickly that like you know there's a new perex every like year and so like you know DYDX shouldn't be valued at like 50 XP if they have to defend from like you know the new generation of whatever it is.

Is there right because Santiago and Hib from Dragonfly, they had this whole debacle where you know Hib was arguing more like this is this should be valued almost more like a city or a state and they have this network model and then you know Santiago was taking more of this price to or sales price to earnings ratio. Where do you fall? And this is less about the velocity of price and you know directionally getting it pushed higher or lower but more in terms of the static valuations that maybe something should be valued at and you know the efficient market would you know take it there swiftly. But where do you fall on this as sort of the value heruristic? What is your what is your mental model when it comes to this this dynamic? Should we kind of fall on one side of the aisle or the other?

Yeah, I I have like a pretty clear mental model that I've arrived to after like you know whatever 10 years dealing with these kind of tokens. Now my my mental model is this like you you have revenue as like one source and like future revenue kind of like a traditional equity you know DCF type of model. You have that and then you have this other thing which I'll call like um it's like this premium for being a good game to gamble on. Like you know you go to the casino and it like if they have a fun game and people will just go like throw money at it. They just want to bet like you know we saw this with pre-markets where like you know these things got just got popular because people were just able to you know speculate on something new that was exciting for them. And um you know some some of these like things were very successful. It's just like a a novel thing that people wanted to just bet with each other on.

And we've seen this like now like even poly market has these like oh you know what will this thing launch at over 4B over 6B like all this kind of stuff. I think, you know, there is a value to just being like the the thing that people will bet on. Like you'll absorb speculative premium for whatever reason, you know, people uh will make bets that they know like are zero or like negative sum for somebody. They're just like, "Oh, I'm going to win." So, doesn't matter if like, you know, overall we're going to lose 10% because I'm going to be the winner. then they're going to they're going to be the one paying the rake because I'm I'm going to be winning. Um and so like tokens that have a lot of mind share and that have a lot of like you know uh distribution for places to bet on you know they have a lot of exchanges betting on it. There's a lot of liquidity. There's a lot of like people talking about it. They'll they'll during that period just have this extra premium and that's what it is.

talking about cities and states and whatever like it's literally like you know are a lot of people wanting to speculate on what is this thing is going to go up or down and for how long is that going to be the case I mean usually like TGE tokens start really high because there's just like a lot of people betting on you know what the next week is going to look like and then there's a new one and then as soon as there's a new one the old one goes down because there's just like less people giving it that premium and that's why you see the that premium disappear.

Yeah. I mean coming to that for 2026 then Jordy um is there particularly sectors that you're going to be bullish on more so than others from a token performance perspective and sectors that you're particularly bearish on from you know either personal or Selen's perspective like applying this framework right of speculative premium you know L1 L1 premium or not uh chain app premium revenue generating tokens is it like where are you kind of looking at for bullish sectors and maybe not so bullish sectors for 2026.

So obviously there's some uh amount of like excitement about taking traditional companies and like cryptoying them and you know giving them stable coin rails and like potentially giving them a token especially if that token is actually like you know collecting the value of of what's happening in some good way. Um, I'm I'm, you know, very open to that idea. I think the quality of the assets that we have in the space is kind of [ __ ] Like, you know, you look at like the number one, like the number 10 token. You know, it's supposed to be good. Like, it's like the 10th best token in all of crypto. It's the 10th best digital asset, the 15th one. Like, you look at some of the stuff and like some of it's just like this. We have having better options than this like this or like Doge or you know, whatever. you just have like a bunch of stuff, right?

Um I think that you know equities are winning out because like they're more quality assets and eventually people have realize that you know you kind of you want something that has longer term sustainability. Um, we will hopefully get some good businesses issuing tokens that represent those businesses and have higher quality assets. And ideally that, you know, there's one in discussion that's making me like incredibly bullish, but I can't talk about it's like very early. It's not it's not even I don't know if it's happening. But if you get like a brand that is like like globally recognizable and even has like new mobility and it has revenue and you and you bring that uh that that's like the sweet spot.

So really trying to focus on a few opportunities that that can hit all those sweet spots that um you know like you like imagine like a global brand that that will actually like do this like you know you can acquire this company for a lot of money but then like you know you you kind of bring those rails.

Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Trade on anything. Economics, weather, sports, crypto, and more. All on couchy.com 24/7 for the world's biggest prediction market. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game.

I want to take a guess on like what what this could be. It kind of gives me like Pudgy Penguins vibes to be honest. Um yeah, like not not obviously quite a bit that Pudgy Penguin is quite a bit smaller. Um um um it actually I you're right because it is like globally recognized but I I kind of get the vibe of like a like a GameStop like a brickandmortar something that has some memeability.

Nike only fans.

Okay, I think we got Jordy back. Let's get him up. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think uh I mean, I was talking about this with the VANC uh portfolio manager in New York last year as well, like like these onchain IPOs. Um yeah, Jordy, you we'll get you right back up here. I think you're good now. We're just refreshing you. Yeah, it does seem like there's going to be this pull away from cryptonative stuff, if you will, businesses to like these like like what would you want to own, right? would you want to own a um an altcoin or would you want to own the tokenized share of a business, right? That's actually and so I think this is like kind of like the trend that's um happening.

I think we're also seeing like the stockification of a lot of these companies. And so if you look at, you know, Jordy said the number 10, but if you look at the number 11, it's uh Yeah. What is it? Figure Helock, which is that coin market cap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's number 11 in the market in market cap. And so so weird. Obviously, this is it's this RWA thing. They're tokenizing these home equity loans. And again, this would be if crypto didn't exist, they would find a way to do this business and it would probably go public or, you know, it would, you know, be private and then it would go public. Yep. And then you could find, you know, this business on a public stock exchange and you could trade it. Yep.

But crypto is eating the back end of a lot of these money stacks within a lot of these companies. And so they're tokenizing the they're tokenizing these companies from the inside out. And I think what we're seeing is like the first thing that we're seeing is we're seeing these these products from these companies get tokenized in the sense that like first we're going to see companies before they tokenize their stock or their equity, they're going to token they're going to launch a stable coin and like before figure goes public or launches its own governance token or network token, it's going to launch this figure heliloc token which if you look basically just a stable coin just tokenized loans. That I think is the first step. And so you'll end up where more and more of the companies in you know the NASDAQ or Dow Jones or S&P more and more of those companies will have tokenized parts of their business call could be a stable coin and then eventually we'll get to a point where those companies themselves will tokenize their equity.

But I think first and foremost we're going to have more parts of those business get tokenized. Yeah. And it'll just look like like the top 10 or 15 tokens could just be stable coins or like yield coins. And then eventually I think we'll we'll expand the the surface area of the tokenization. We'll expand it from the inside out going from just a product a stable coin product that they launched to tokenizing more and more of the business. Yeah. The equity the stable coin and more parts from there.

Jordan. So, kind of hopping onto a different tangent off of the onchain businesses that you're excited about, which I I think again it's like Hyperlid caused an entire restructuring of how the space is thinking about profitable businesses on chain. Obviously, the new administration came in now. Now, we're having token buyback, token equity conversations that's happening. I think what you're saying is going to re restructure the way that a lot of investors think about which tokens to allocate to in the space because if you've got these massive brands as you're saying with business models with revenue and they have a token well that puts them in the top five like very clearly or top seven right and so you know that game is going to change when we were in New York um you uh respectfully told me that my infra thesis was just not going to live up to anything and I was kind kind of like still a a a believer in our venture bags. Come six months later, I'm absolutely cooked. So, you were right on that one. Props to you for that one. Um cooked me there straight. Looked me in the eye. I was like, "You're wrong, buddy. Get your [ __ ] together." So, thanks for that. Uh but we we were also talking about Micro Strategy. We were also talking about the This was like pre-dat kind of DAT mania, but Micro Strategy was on and you had kind of formulated a a take around where you see kind of this space going. And then obviously we had the entire DAT craze.

Um where are we at from your perspective with this part of the market? Um is this is Tom Lee gonna get you know absolutely BTFOed liquidated? Is he going to make it? Like where are we at with DATs? You know take us from like micro strategy all the way to like long tail story protocol DAT. Like where are we at in the spectrum from your perspective?

Yeah, I mean the DATs were another one that I was very skeptical about and I just knew like these things would trade under MNAV because you just have a worse version of owning the token because you have an illquid like way you can't actually sell the token and in some cases you know the founders blocking you in some cases you just have too much of a a token like Bitcoin ETH maybe you can sell you know you can sell like a billion dollars if you have but like nothing else. So um thankfully avoided most of these dats you know we did we did a few for commercial reasons but um didn't do many and um the the part of the cycle I mean look I I did like have a concern that like one we would get this massive like run up to 200k and this crazy mania and that that's would be the cause of it because we would just way overheat and then we would collapse. We didn't heat up that much. I mean, we did go to like, you know, 130 and ETH went to 5K, whatever, whatever. But, um, we it didn't get like too ridiculous. And so, even though the the bubble burst, it wasn't like a ridiculous bubble. So, we've kind of like gone through it.

It's the same thing where I was saying I was warning like around the the DOS event in in London that um I had that debate with Hib about uh synthetic dollars and I was warning that like you know this this thing people are going to keep like yeah you have Athena but then you have like you know people just adding risk to get more yield because it's not getting enough yield and this is going to like blow up and people are pres presenting these things are stable coins. like presenting them as dollars or pegging them to dollars. I mean, sure enough, like two weeks later, you just get like this collapse of stream finance and you know, that hund00 million loss just permeated like through the entire like, you know, vault ecosystem of of every single exposure of like elixir had some of this thing which had that some of that thing and it's just like this like everyone was was like, you know, indirectly being touched on it. Um, but thankfully like you know what I warned happened but it happened at like a size before things got like way too big. You know it got it happened at a 100red million of a loss instead of like a 10 billion loss like you know like Luna did.

So um you know bottom line like we've gone through where are we on the cycle? like we've we've had a few of these bad things that I predicted happen have happened like the DATs kind of splintered and like this but it's not catastrophic and I don't think that you're going to see Micro Strategy or you know Tumbly blow up in essence like these things like still have they still have a bid um they still have cash they still have participation the tokens that they're buying are actually like worth something uh in both cases like ETH and BTC so um you you know, are they going to be able to buy as much as they used to, you know, a few months ago? Like, no. Uh, and that that bids like reduced, but it could come back and and I think like, you know, for those two big ones that you mentioned, um, the game's not over and, you know, the assets that they're buying are good assets and so that that game will continue. But when it comes to the altcoin dads, uh, yeah, I mean, it's it's it's just the graveyard out there.

Yeah, it is. Um, and so do you think that these DATs putting their like so Tom Lee has staked, you know, billions into ETH now and then Sharplink has also just recently put a bunch of their ETH into like IE Layer and Lineia and um, EtherFi and whatnot. Is this something that is at all interesting or is just kind of like the because like you know like the trend is okay they can't just be holding companies these DATs need to turn into more productive companies. I guess deploying their assets onchain is one way to do it but is this is it enough? Is it interesting? Is it compelling or is it just is it just me?

I mean look if if there's there are some that are trying to be like proper operating companies and get like actual real revenues and like you know build business like do stuff that that's fine and like you know um like there's like the Aether one trying to do some stuff with compute like there's there's a few trying to be an operating company and then that's fine the ones that are just like oh we're going to stake this or put it into IE layer like those yields are obviously viously going to get compressed and you can't do it on size and you know it's not tremendously profitable or interesting to just like do that and then you can make it more interesting if you take more risk but then you're just like a hedge fun um and maybe you make a mistake and and you like lose money because you're taking too much risk so um look they have to try stuff I mean so many people even like the big names of the industry even like the Sanmanis and the hives who like were initially like very anti-dat. They end up doing they end up doing that themselves. So you got the AVAC one, you got the like Solano one, you know, like there these guys are on the boards. I mean, everyone's kind of like committed